


i'll leave my love hidden in the sun

by gracethescribbler, revanchxst (BadWolfGirl01)



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Alien Creatures, Alternate Universe - Canon, Alternate Universe - Dystopia, BAMF Ahsoka Tano, Based on a Tumblr Post, Class Differences, Clones are bad liars, Coruscant (Star Wars), Coruscant Levels, Coruscant Lore, Cultural Differences, F/M, Gen, Glowy stuff, Hunters & Hunting, Monsters, Rex is Trying His Best, Sort Of, The Dark Side of the Force, Undercover Missions, disguises, fun undercover shenanigans, ish, the vibes are creepy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-09
Updated: 2020-03-09
Packaged: 2021-02-28 19:49:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,006
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23082763
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gracethescribbler/pseuds/gracethescribbler, https://archiveofourown.org/users/BadWolfGirl01/pseuds/revanchxst
Summary: In the lowest levels of Coruscant, the Republic and the war might as well not exist, and the hunting clans keep the levels without sunlight fed since the Senate can't be bothered to do it. Ahsoka Tano hunts with her clan and doesn't know that the power she sometimes uses to help them is the Force. On the upper levels, the Jedi Council has noticed more Dark influence on the general population than usual (which is saying something) and their only lead is that there's something deeper in Coruscant that's causing it. They decide to send a squad of clones undercover in search of the problem, and it turns out that that's more complicated than it sounded.Especially when Ahsoka just about cuts Rex's throat for a jar of bacta.
Relationships: CC-2224 | Cody & CT-7567 | Rex, CT-7567 | Rex/Ahsoka Tano
Comments: 15
Kudos: 132





	i'll leave my love hidden in the sun

**Author's Note:**

> This idea and universe is almost 100% based off of [this post](https://collegefangirl3791.tumblr.com/post/190987517737/star-wars-concept) on Tumblr by @gallusrostromegalus, and we've been having some fun with it. At least for the time being this fic will not update quickly, but we are working on it!
> 
> Comment if you enjoy and thanks for reading. :)

Ahsoka Tano has never seen the sun.

Down on the Mid and Low levels of Coruscant, where she and her clan live, hunt, and sell their catches, everything is durasteel and duracrete and plastoid and materials older than that, even, and the sunlight only comes through the rare places where huge shafts have been carved out of the infrastructure to allow ships to descend into the depths and the harmful gasses from the lowest levels to be released - though even these shafts stop, eventually, before they reach zero.

(She’s been to zero once, nearly four and a half miles below the upper levels where it’s said everyone has water and electricity all the time and no one starves and people drive speeders through the sky. Her clan had taken all their best Hunters and gone fishing in the depths, managed to snare a catch that fed their whole clan for two weeks.)

They have lights that help with the lack of sun, when they can get enough electricity to run them, but for the most part they work with portable lamps that run off power cells they charge during the times when Mid actually gets enough power to run things, and the glow rods they take down into Low when they hunt. Most of them don’t really  _ need _ light down there - hunting trips usually take ten rotations or more, and by the end of the first wake-cycle everyone’s eyes have adjusted back to the deep dark. The luminescent tattoos and face paint help with that, and make sure that no one mistakes their Hunters for that of a rival clan, or worse, some poor sentient that’s turned into prey.

Ahsoka enjoys the hunts, navigating the treacherous levels with nothing but her vibropike, her knife, and her blaster, coming back with the kind of creatures that would kill anyone less skilled and that will feed her entire family or that they can trade for other things - some of the clan farms, and some craft things, and some collect water and purify it, and some tend to the injured and sick, and some just make sure all the meat and fungi and other odd plants they bring back aren’t going to kill people.

Though sometimes they do keep the really toxic stuff and find ways to send it to one of the rival clans. It’s always nice to weed out the competition, and depending on what the stuff is, sometimes the dead people sell just as well as the other creatures.

When you’re starving, meat is meat, after all.

Twice a month, the clan takes their wares to market, where it can be purchased by the Mid citizens who aren’t part of the clans and who maybe even have real jobs in the upper levels of Coruscant - sometimes even people from Upper come down. They usually try to hide themselves but it’s too obvious who they are, and those are the best times, because they don’t know the worth of things on the market and it’s too easy to steal from them. Carefully, because they don’t want to discourage the Uppers from coming back.

One time some cloudheads from way up top brought the police down to market - she thinks they were Senators or some shit, preaching about  _ reform _ like they weren’t trying to destroy the livelihood of millions. It’s the only time Ahsoka’s seen the clans united - they’d fought back and killed a bunch of cops until they decided to retreat and leave everyone alone. The unity hadn’t lasted for long, of course, because then everyone had started fighting over who got to sell the cops, but it’d still been pretty cool.

Since then, nobody’s tried to interfere or force them to pay taxes or other shit.

Ahsoka’s at market one rotation, trying to pass off some k’lor’slug meat as cthon (because meat is meat, but some people appreciate being lied to about certain kinds, even when they all but know already), when off to one side, half-hidden behind a pile of old crates, she sees a group of five men, four huddling around one who’s sitting on the ground, leaning against the crate wall. She stares at them, trying to place them - they look like Middlers, but they don’t  _ act _ like they belong here, like they know this place. They don’t quite act like Uppers, either.

It doesn’t make sense.

Ahsoka leaves her booth, though not before making sure her partner for the rotation, Teren, is actually paying attention (if their wares get stolen on her watch - hers, since she’s the senior sister here - she’d be in so much trouble, would get all the  _ shittiest _ jobs for ages), and walks a little closer, and that’s how she happens to notice one of the men pulling out-

There’s  _ no way. _

There’s only dim light reaching behind the crates, but that’s still enough for her sensitive eyes to pick out what looks like a jar of bacta, and she watches and waits as the man dabs it onto the sitting man’s hip and puts it away, and then-

She  _ moves. _

She pulls her vibropike off her shoulder and  _ leaps _ at the group, lands and spins around, twirling the pike and knocking them all on their asses (they’re scrambling and she can tell they know how to fight, but she’s got the element of surprise and she’s so much faster), then slings the weapon back over her shoulder and tackles the man she’d seen with the bacta. Yanks out her knife in her left hand and presses it into his throat, just enough he can feel the pressure, and grabs her blaster pistol with her right hand and aims it at the rest of the group, who are all on their feet with blasters out now.

“You have  _ bacta,” _ she snaps, snarls a little at one of the men, who has a scar curling around one eye, showing her fangs. 

Forget the k’lor’slugs, if she brings home  _ bacta _ she’ll practically be a hero, and they’ll be rich enough to challenge Serresh, and maybe even they’ll be able to use some for their own people.

So she has to get that bacta, even if it means killing all five of these strange men for it.

~~~

Rex misses the sun.

It's been almost three weeks since he and a squad (consisting of Cody, Fives, Jesse, and Echo) had moved down to Coruscant's middle levels, past the reach of sunlight and fresh air, on an op for the Jedi Council. Rex never would have thought that he could miss sunlight so much - he'd believed that this would be simple enough to adapt to, like any other adverse condition, but he's starting to realize he'd been naive to think so. After their campaign just before, a week in Umbara’s dark, the Mid levels sometimes feel like they’ve never left Umbara at all, like he’s never going to see the sun again.

When they'd been planning the mission, Jedi healers had filled their supply packs with vitamin supplements and pills to help their systems with the poor air and the richer types of rations that would give them more energy. The doctors had warned about lethargy and depression and an erratic sleep schedule and all sorts of other side effects. Kix had added stim shots and extra bacta to their supplies with a dire warning about how doomed the op was without a proper medic. "They're going to get you killed this time around," he'd muttered. "This is a terrible idea. They oughta just let the issue sort itself out."

They all know the Council can't do that, though. For the past months, Coruscant has been seething with protests and riots and unrest, which would not be particularly unusual, but perfectly ordinary citizens have been threatening the Coruscant Guard and GAR workers in the streets, there have been a number of reckless assassination attempts on Senators, most without what seemed like sufficient cause, and the protests are hurting local businesses. The real issue, though, according General Kenobi, is that the Jedi have been sensing a Dark influence in the growing anger, "as if it was being fed by something." General Windu had traced the sense to the lower levels of Coruscant, and that's when they'd decided they had to send someone to investigate.

It had been summarily agreed upon that a squad of Jedi could never fit in on the lower levels, and that going and questioning citizens where the Jedi and Senate had no sway would be foolish, so General Kenobi had proposed that they send troopers on an undercover operation, to find what information they could about the problem and come back with a report.

The problem has been, so far, that no one up top knows much about the levels below sunlight. In between lectures about their health, Kenobi had laid out what information they do have: there are massive supply and power shortages, there is little law enforcement presence, there are black markets and rumors of strange creatures and unique power structures. Mostly, Kenobi teaches them how to ask questions and get information without standing out too much - it mostly consists of blending in and laying low and observing things while they try to learn the patterns and rules of the place. Rex has never considered himself subtle, but as it turns out, he’s not bad at blending in. Better than most of his squad, anyway.

Although they assume that most of the middle and lower levels aren’t too familiar with what clones look like out of uniform, a squad of five identical men wandering around would look too suspicious. That means, first of all, that their kit (Rex’s carefully-maintained armor) has to stay in the barracks and they’ll be going around in civvies.  _ And,  _ as it turns out, they’ve all got to get makeovers. That’s how General Skywalker’s padawan Katoonie puts it, which isn’t terribly helpful. Rex is told to let his hair grow longer, and they give him green contacts and a false scar on his jaw; Echo gets his nose reshaped and his hair dyed; Fives very proudly dyes his goatee and hair red, much to everyone’s chagrin; Jesse suffers through an application of makeup over his tattoo and agrees to a false new one; and Cody outright refuses to have his scar covered up and reluctantly agrees to let his beard grow. It’s the most unique any of them have ever looked, and it’s horrible. They don’t look like themselves at all, which Rex knows is why Cody wouldn’t let them cover up his scar. Jesse doesn’t look like Jesse, without his tattoo, and he’s pissed as hells about it. Rex keeps reminding him it’s just temporary.

“Yeah, well, excuse me for preferring my  _ real face,”  _ Jesse snaps back, and Rex can’t even be irritated with him.  _ He _ doesn’t like seeing the wrong eyes in his own face, either. It’s like looking at another person.

They have a safehouse here in the lower levels, which has served as their base of operations, and by now they’ve worked out how the markets work, when it’s best to just walk past the things happening down side streets, which of the strange meats and plants in the markets are edible (the answer is, almost all). As far as they can tell, the best way to move around the Mid levels, or, as it’s beginning to seem like they will have to do, the Low levels, is to be part of a clan - one of the people who hunt things to sell in the market. Because there are creatures that live down in Low that they’ve been reluctantly eating alongside their rations and which are apparently dangerous.

All of them agree, however, that the easiest way to learn more about the Dark influence on Coruscant is to keep moving towards where its effects seem strongest, and they have some decent data pointing them even deeper into the dark. Which is, as Jesse puts it, “just great.”

They visit the market about once a week, hoping now to see clan members and find a way to get into the groups - clans seem to distinguish themselves with armbands, sometimes colors and paint, but it hasn’t been easy to learn how the clans  _ find  _ people and it's risky to ask. This week, they go later in the evening, each with one hand on their pouches of credit sticks and one hand on their blasters. They’re mostly purchasing food, and Rex picks up one of the specialized vibroblades with luminescent lines tracing up the blade. As they’re going through the market, however, Jesse tries to push past a group of people to a booth, and quicker than Rex can blink, the people - part of some clan, by the looks of things - have turned on Jesse and are shouting at him, pushing him around. They’re not speaking Basic, so Rex doesn’t know what they’re angry about, but down here it doesn’t take much for things to get violent, and when Echo rushes over to try to get Jesse out of the situation, his intentions are clearly mistaken, because someone hauls off and punches him in the face.

It only gets worse from there - the rest of the squad gets involved, the booth owner shouts at them, and when some young Trandoshan in the clan stabs Echo in the hip, Rex and Cody signal to their squad to disengage and just cut their losses.

"Well," says Fives, two streets down and out of the market proper, after they've made an undignified and hasty exit, "I guess we have personal proof that the Dark side shit is happening here too, now." He's supporting Echo, although Echo claims he's fine - before their campaign on Umbara, a battalion had found him in a Separatist prison, exhausted and terribly injured but alive, although one arm and both legs had been replaced with prosthetics. This is Echo's first campaign since and not an ideal one at that, but it's been combat light until now.

Rex has Fives help Echo sit down against a wall, and crouches down himself, reaching into his pack for their precious supply of bacta. They don't have much, and it's dangerous to use it down here (bacta in the market costs a fortune and has an armed guard, they can't afford more and don’t want this stolen), but Rex isn't about to risk Echo getting infected.

He's just cleaned the wound and is applying some of the bacta when a lithe figure leaps into the center of their squad, almost on top of Echo, and lashes out with some kind of staff, swiping the legs out from under Rex's  _ vode.  _ He starts to leap up, himself, and the person tackles him, not even bothering to use the staff, which surprises him enough that he doesn't notice the knife they draw until the cold line of the edge is against his neck. Rex's brothers have gotten back up and drawn their blasters, but the person - a Togruta woman, slight, with a clan armband - draws a blaster of her own and points it at Echo. Rex notes that Echo's grabbed their jar of bacta off the ground and is holding it in one hand, tight.

"You have  _ bacta,"  _ she says, her teeth bared in something close to a growl, and Rex pushes himself up partway onto one elbow and feels the knife pressing into his skin.

"What about it?" he snaps, with as much bravado as he thinks he can get away with (without being gutted like a fish).

"I'm taking it," she says, "that's worth  _ so much." _ She has orange skin, blue and white- what are they called, people call Togs' horns all kinds of things and Rex is fairly sure none of those are the right names. Judging by the battle scarred look of her clothes and the vibropike - what he'd thought was a staff - over her back, she's been down here a long time.

"The hells you are." When Rex cranes his head to look, Jesse is tapping his finger on the trigger of his blaster and looks about ready to shoot. He won't, but he's not happy. Rex sighs.

"I am, whether you give it to me willingly or not." She presses her knife harder into Rex's neck.

Jesse opens his mouth to say something else, angry, but Cody holds up a hand and he sheepishly closes it again.

"We can't give you all our bacta," he says, calmly, although his hand is very tight around his blaster. "We need it."

She's not impressed. "My clan needs it more."

"How about you let him up and we can talk about it," Cody says. He's not a good negotiator, however long he's spent with General Kenobi, but it's nice he's trying.

The woman gives Cody a long, mistrusting look, then, much to Rex's relief, says, "Fine. But I can still kill you," and gets off of him. Rex is careful not to move too quickly, but once she's standing again, he gets up and moves over by Echo. "What about a trade?" he says. "We don't have much of this, but enough to give you some."

"What do you want for it?" she retorts, with another sharp look. Rex settles his hand on his blaster again.

"What've you got?"

"Food," she answers. "Power cells." Neither of which will really be helpful, for them. When they don't react to either offer, she adds, reluctantly, "A sun lamp."

That's tempting. Fives makes an interested noise, and Rex almost says they'd take that, although it's not really a good trade for their bacta. Rex looks at Cody, who doesn't look happy either.

Rex is on the verge of asking what else she might have, when his eyes land on her clan armband again. "You're part of a clan," he says, crossing his arms and trying not to seem eager. "You think if we traded  _ all _ our bacta, you could get us in too?" He's not even sure this is how clan membership works, and Cody shoots him a warning look, because for all they know what he's said is insulting. But hells, they've gotta try something.

~~~

Ahsoka tilts her head to one side, considering the men and sheathing her knife. “Maybe,” she says, thoughtfully. “You trying to get into a clan? There’s easier ways to live, if you want to try an honest job with the  _ Republic.” _

“We don’t really have that option,” one of them says, and Ahsoka smiles a little, jams her blaster away.

“In that case,” she says, “I can take you to my boss. How much bacta do you have?”

The green-eyed blond man points at the jar that the injured man is holding, says, “This. Couple bacta patches.”

That’s- so  _ much. _ Ahsoka can’t help grinning, pleased with herself - Carda will definitely be happy with this, maybe enough that Ahsoka can get some extra rations, and there’s probably plenty of bacta to act as tribute for these people. “Okay. Cool. I can take you to see my boss, but you’ll have to wait until closer to the end of wake, I’ve got shit to sell.”

She gives them all a pointed look, then adds, “Oh, by the way, what’re your names? I’m Ahsoka.”

“I’m Rex,” the blond man who’s been talking says, and they go around the circle - the man with the scar on his face is Cody, Jesse has the facial tattoo, Echo is the injured one, and Fives is the redhead. They seem… nice enough, and they agree to wait for her, and so Ahsoka goes back to Teren and the table.

“I got us some bacta,” she singsongs, patting Teren’s shoulder. “Definitely gonna get the extra rations this week.”

“You left our table unattended for like- too long,” Teren says, grumpy. “So she’s not gonna give them to you.”

Ahsoka flicks Teren’s left lek, grinning when he grumbles and ducks away from her. “So you don’t count as  _ attended, _ is that what you’re saying? Or did you wander off?”

“That’s not what I  _ meant.” _

“Well, it’s what you said.”

They bicker on and off for another hour or so, until most of the meat has been sold or traded off and market is starting to die down, and then Ahsoka tells Teren to pack up and head back to their compound and goes over to where she left Rex and the others.

They’re sitting around talking and playing sabaac with a deck of cards they must’ve been carrying, though when she comes over the one with the scar, Cody, says something abrupt in the strange rippling language they’re using (it’s one she thinks she’s heard a few times, maybe, but not often enough to know what it is) and they all look over at her.

“Come on,” she says, “market’s over and if you wanna meet Carda, now’s your chance.”

Rex gets up, handing his cards over to Fives, frowning a little. “Who’s Carda?”

“The boss of my clan, Isk,” Ahsoka explains. “She’s the one you have to talk to if you want to get in.”

“Great,” Rex says, gesturing at the others with him. “Lead the way.”

Ahsoka starts off down the grimy streets, tugging the hood of her jacket up over her montrals and checking to make sure her purple band is still tight around her arm and her weapons are all in place - it wouldn’t do to lose any of them. The clan band is easily replaced, but her weapons are expensive and also hers, and besides, she’d definitely lose the extra rations if she lost her pike.

It’s not a short trip back to the compound - they have to drop two levels down and go a few blocks over, and out of courtesy for the group behind her Ahsoka takes them to the lift, first, which only works sometimes but is much easier than taking the scenic route.

But when she slaps her hand against the button to open the doors, nothing budges, and she swears, kicks at the door and grumbles to herself. “Yeah, should’ve figured. We’re going to have to get down the more acrobatic way. That bother anyone?”

“Yes,” one of them mutters under his breath - she thinks it’s Jesse, but she’s not totally sure, and either way he gets an elbow in the side from Fives.

Rex nods, though, and since he seems to be the spokesperson, she listens to him. “That’s fine.” He looks at the one named Echo, adds, “I’ll give you a hand if you need it.”

Ahsoka looks closer at Echo, says, “You’ve got a lot of cybernetics for somebody from Upper.”

Echo blinks, tenses just a little, says, “Yeah. Guess I do.” He’s definitely got something to hide, in regards to all those prosthetics, but she doesn’t particularly care. Probably got in some kind of accident or something and couldn’t afford bacta (although good prosthetics are almost as impossible to come by, unless you can steal them).

“Cool.” Ahsoka gives the lift one last, irritated kick before she turns and starts off towards the set of stairs that got wrecked by the last acid rain - those don’t happen very often in Mid, but sometimes if water leaks at the wrong time and hits the wrong pile of pollution… Well, some of this durasteel is old.

“Careful on the stairs,” she warns once they get to the top, and then she starts down, careful, until she gets to the point where the acid rotted away the stairs as well as part of the wall, revealing a network of pipes and support struts that just so happen to be close enough to jump to. “Here’s where it gets a little tricky, just follow me.”

She jumps from the end of the stairs and grabs onto a pipe, scales down the wall a couple meters until she can step onto a ledge wide enough for two people and follow it around a corner. Someone’s recently bolted a ladder to the ledge, and Ahsoka jumps onto it, climbs down and takes a few steps back and waits.

Echo seems to be struggling a little with the climb, but as he’d said he would, Rex stops to help him, and though it takes them longer than it takes her, they still make it down fairly quickly. Not bad, then, either they’re sort of used to the kinds of acrobatics that it takes to navigate between some levels here in Mid and Low, or they’re just athletic in general. Probably the latter, she thinks, watching Rex for a moment, noting the muscular build underneath his heavy, layered clothes - they’re all built that way, really, but especially him. 

“Do you have to do this every time you go to market?” Jesse asks, huffing a little, and Ahsoka raises an eyebrow at him.

“What, you don’t think you can make it? Trust me, this is easy.” She spins away and starts off again, pretends not to hear Jesse grumbling  _ I never said that _ behind her. “And yes,” she adds, over her shoulder, “we do.”

Sometimes the lifts work, but honestly, Ahsoka can’t even remember the last time she checked before making her way to this route. The power is on rarely enough as it is, they probably don’t bother with most of the lifts, because as anyone down here knows, the cloudheads in charge of the Republic don’t  _ actually _ care about the people on their capital world. If they did, they’d at least  _ try _ to figure out a way to help with the shortages and to make the lower levels habitable again.

But instead, all they do is ignore everything, except for the times they come down and try to force everyone to stop the only things that actually keep all these people  _ alive. _ Maybe the Senate would rather Mid just died off - but then who would do all their grunt work?

When Ahsoka was a kid, she’d hated them, but now that she’s sixteen and an adult by word of the clans and has been going on hunts for four years, that hatred has settled into an exhausted sort of indifference. It’s too tiring to hate people who don’t even know you exist and wouldn’t care if they did.

So she survives in spite of them, just like the rest of her clan, just like all the clans. Survives out of spite, and out of the hope that someday there might be a better future.

The clan compound is built inside an old, hollowed out apartment building that takes up an entire block and spans three levels up, and it has a large, tattered purple flag out front of the main entrance, adorned with the clan’s symbol in gold, which is, cleverly, an Aurebesh isk. (The story goes that the first boss, the one who started the clan, had been drunk when someone asked him what his clan name was, and he settled on Isk because “all the other letters before it are too normal”.)

Most of the living areas are on the third floor, half the first floor is taken up by their hydroponics farm, and as Ahsoka leads Rex and the others up the stairs in the corner of the building, she waves at her family as she passes - Teren is putting away their stuff from market, and Vinya has dirt smudged on her face and is leaving the hydroponics area, and Jurr is coming down the stairs towards her, grinning. “What’re you doing, Ahsoka?” he asks, curious, nodding at the men with her, and Ahsoka returns the smile.

“Oh, nothing, I just have  _ definitely _ won this week’s extra rations.” She winks, says,  _ “Bacta, _ Jurr.”

“No way,” he says. “Good job, sister, Carda’ll be proud of that.”

“I’m counting on it.” Ahsoka starts up the stairs again, grinning and taking them two at a time.

She can’t  _ wait. _

~~~

Rex can’t help but be hyperaware of everyone they pass as they walk through the abandoned building that appears to be home to Ahsoka’s clan. The people around them, like Ahsoka, wear pieced-together clothing of leather and hides and blastweave and whatever else they can, and there are patterns and symbols in luminescent paint on many of their clothes and faces. No one is without weapons, of course, which doesn’t really help Rex’s nerves. He thinks it’s only some sense of honor that’s keeping them alive right now, since it would be much easier for the clan to kill them and take their supplies. He’s still not sure that isn’t what will happen.

Ahsoka leads them up a couple flights of stairs - and Rex maps the turns they take as well as he can, if they need to make a quick exit - always heading deeper into the building, which makes sense. You don’t want to make it easy to get to the person in charge, especially not in such a dangerous line of business.

Eventually, Ahsoka leads them down one hall, stops at a thick door made of cracked and swollen wood, and raps a quick pattern with her knuckles, casual. Without much pause or fanfare, the door scrapes hard against the floor and shudders open, although before they can walk in a Wookiee stands in the doorway and stares at them through narrowed eyes before barking something over his shoulder that sounds almost bored. Then he moves, and when Ahsoka strides into the room, Rex glances at Cody and follows her. Cody looks like he wants to turn around and leave again and Rex can’t help but share the sentiment.

There’s not much in the room - there are no windows (what would be the point) and just a few low-power lamps, and a round table, at which is sitting a purple Rodian woman with one scarred, milky-white eye and markings like freckles on her face. She looks older, and nearly uninterested in them, although Rex thinks that more likely she’s just looking at them closely and trying to appear as if she’s not.

Ahsoka nods at the woman, seeming pleased with herself. “Carda?” she says. “These guys want to join the clan, and they brought bacta as tribute.”

Rex looks at Cody again, then looks at the Rodian, Carda apparently, whose expression hasn’t changed. Rex nods, once, carefully slings his pack off his shoulders and reaches in, reluctantly pulls out the remaining bacta patches he has and the jar he’d been using to treat Echo. There’s another jar of bacta and some more patches in Cody’s pack, but he’s hesitant to hand those over.

“Interesting.” Carda pushes her chair back from the table and stands - she’s barely five feet tall, but she’s muscular and carrying two blasters and a vibroblade on her belt. The feigned disinterest is gone, and she narrows her eye, looks the five of them conspicuously up and down. “Well,” she says. “You do have bacta. And a lot of it, too.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Rex says.

Carda reaches over and takes the jar from him, turning it over in her fingers. “And you want to join our clan with this.”

“Yes.”

“It’s quite enough, to be sure,” she answers, “but joining the clan is not simply a transaction.” She turns and sets the jar down on the table with a thunk. “We are all brothers and sisters here, and we share everything. Good fortune and bad, all our possessions. It’s how we live.”

Rex looks at Carda thoughtfully for a moment - he’d been of the impression that the clans here operated like gangs or crime syndicates, and that joining a clan was their best bet but could also get them stabbed in the back. Instead, it’s sounding like they’ll have a reliable source of shelter and supplies (as reliable as it gets down here) while they try to investigate. That does mean, though, that they shouldn’t be keeping reserves of bacta to themselves. So he nods, says, “We understand,” and makes a short series of hand signals at Cody.  _ All assets. _ Better to be up front now - if they really do just lose their bacta, they’ll make do until they can go back to the surface.

Cody sighs, gives him a look that plainly says  _ I don’t like this, _ and slings his pack off his shoulder to pull out the rest of their bacta, which elicits a brief “But-” from Fives before he thinks better of it.

“Interesting.” Carda steps past Rex, takes the rest of the bacta from Cody, and nods.

“We’re willing to put in the work here, ma’am,” Jesse says, politely.

“Well.” Carda sets all the patches and the other jar down on the table as well, crosses her arms, and looks them all over again. “You will have to prove yourselves, but for the time being, you may stay.” She looks at Ahsoka and smiles. “Since you brought them here, Ahsoka, will you show them where to go?” There’s something almost proud about her smile.

Ahsoka, looking at the pile of bacta, mutters, “Holy kriff.” Then she looks up, nods, and says, “Yeah, sure, Carda. Everybody, I’ll show you some rooms.”

Rex looks at Cody, then back at Ahsoka. “Lead the way.”

Ahsoka leads them up another flight of stairs and down a hall, and points them to two rooms next to each other. “Two people to a room, freshers are shared between four rooms but all we’ve got is sonic showers so don’t expect anything much.” Jesse shoots Rex a grin - usually their fare is communal sonics and the barracks. This isn’t bad at all. “If you want to toss your stuff in I’ll give you the tour.”

They all exchange looks, and then Fives, Jesse, and Echo make for one room, divesting themselves of their packs, and Rex and Cody claim the other. They’re  _ nice _ rooms - Cody and Rex’s has a desk, and two musty armchairs, and a big old bowed bed with an actual mattress and pillows. If they ignored how everything looks a little stained and on the verge of falling apart, it’s probably going to be the best place he’s ever stayed in - aside from the time they had to escort Senators with Generals Skywalker and Kenobi and they ended up in a hotel.

Cody taps the mattress of the bed with one hand and looks at Rex, raises an eyebrow. “Guess this’ll be alright.”

“Yeah.” Rex nods. “I hope it’s okay I made that call.”

“I think this whole op suits you better than me,” Cody says. “You convinced a droid you were one of its friends, I think if you say we oughta go with this, you’re probably right.”

“Shut up, this is not the same,” Rex answers, but he can’t help but laugh.

Cody shakes his head and heads back out into the hall, and Rex pushes their packs under the old bed and follows him. Ahsoka nods at them and walks away from the rooms, and Rex sees his other brothers relax for the first time since they’d left for the market today. Maybe this will be good, to stay here a while.

~~~

Ahsoka is pretty sure that the guys she’s just recruited are secretly  _ rich. _

It sounds far-fetched, sure, but they had two jars of bacta (which they were holding out on her, but whatever, she guesses she gets it) and all those patches, and she’s  _ never _ seen that much all in one place before. She figures they must’ve come down from the upper levels, maybe not all the way in Upper, but probably. Maybe they thought this would be fun, or a good change of pace, or maybe they’ve gotten in trouble and had to sneak down here, or- 

There’s no point wondering about it. But there’s something exciting about the fact that these new people, whoever they are, are so  _ different _ from her - it’s almost exotic, they  _ never _ get people who are completely new to Mid, not in the clans. Especially not handsome new people who carry around thousands of credits worth of bacta like it’s nothing and can afford to use it on something so simple as that knife wound. One of her hands absently goes to the scar on her headtail, and she traces a finger over it for a minute, thoughtful. If they’d had bacta and the kind of sutures suitable for lekku and montrals it wouldn’t have scarred, but the latter are even harder to find down here than bacta. Which is kinda surprising, given how many Twi’leks and Togruta there are in Mid.

The guys come out of their respective rooms, Rex and Cody quietly bickering with each other - are they brothers? They look similar, if she studies them for a minute, and it would make sense. “Ready for the grand tour?” she asks, casually, leaning against the wall.

“Absolutely,” Fives says, pleased with himself for some reason she can’t parse, and he nudges Echo with one elbow. “Aren’t we?”

“Yes,” Cody says, looking like he’s barely keeping from rolling his eyes. Ahsoka likes him, she thinks, though he seems very… serious.

Rex is much more interesting.

Ahsoka grins, pushes off the wall and turns on her heel, starting down the hallway. “This whole floor is just residential, really, but there’s a communal cafeteria up here. If you don’t want our food, you can go get your own, but we all eat the same pfassk around here, and unless you’ve got a lot of money or even more bacta hidden away somewhere, you’re eating it too.” She shrugs, leading them through the hallways to where they’d cleared out some of the rooms to make a small but cozy common area - there’s a couple braziers with small fires and a couple people cooking something in a pot, and over in one corner, smoking a deathstick (she sees him with them at least a few times a month, and she doesn’t even want to know where he’s getting them, because Carda’s banned using clan resources to trade for things like deathsticks and actual blue-label whiskey and what-have-you -  _ do it on your own time, _ she says) is the clan’s only Mando, a former bounty hunter who calls himself Ne’gai. Nobody really knows much about him, except that Carda gives him more leeway than most, he’s their best Hunter despite being an older Human, grizzled and worn with greying red hair and sideburns, and his real name isn’t Ne’gai. It’s some title or something he picked up before he left Mandalore, Ahsoka doesn’t totally know what it means.

He’s nice, she thinks, although he’s also kind of- prickly, almost. He doesn’t like to talk, but one time, when she’d been younger, she’d gone up to him one night and very quietly asked him what Mandalore was like. He’d been almost fond, told her about how most of the ecosystem was pretty ruined from constant warfare, how people lived in biodomes but could still grow gardens. It’d been almost incomprehensible - he’d used words she barely understands, can’t picture, but she hadn’t wanted to ask him to explain them. He’d felt sad enough already.

“That’s Ne’gai,” she says, pointing him out, now, “he usually leads our hunts. The other stairs are right over here,” and she crosses the room and wrenches open the unwieldy duraplast door. Rex and the others are looking at each other like they noticed something she didn’t, but they don’t say anything, so she shrugs to herself and keeps walking, holds the door for Echo to grab for the others.

On the second floor, she takes them through the water processing area, past their tiny med ward (a few cots crammed together, some basic supplies, what little bacta they have - which has just been probably quadrupled, Rui’ll be happy), to the storage rooms where they keep, well, everything except for the few personal belongings people have. There’s a few other systems on the second floor, and she points those out as well, then takes them to the first floor, which holds another common area, the hydroponics farm, and the gym.

“If you’re good with plants, talk to Vinya, she’s our plant person,” Ahsoka says, waving a hand descriptively. She honestly has no idea what they do inside there, she’s never been very good with plants, but she supposes maybe somebody… likes… them?

“I think I’ll pass,” Jesse says, and Ahsoka grins at him.

“I knew I liked you for a reason,” she proclaims, although  _ really _ she hasn’t known them for very long, and can’t exactly tell if she likes them or not. “Anyway, the gym is up here, and it’s the best place in the compound, don’t let anyone try to tell you otherwise. Dinner is gonna be soon, but you’re free to do whatever you want until then.”

Rex looks over at the others then back at her, says, “Okay, great.  _ I _ just have a question, actually - what’d Carda mean about having to prove ourselves? What’re we gonna have to do?”

“Well,” Ahsoka says, leaning against the nearest wall, “everybody has to contribute, and you’ve got to prove that you can do that and are gonna be loyal to us. Showing us your extra bacta was a good first step, but we’re a family here, so we have to trust each other. Looking at you guys, she’s probably going to send you on the next hunt with us, see how you handle it.”

Jesse grins to himself, nudges Fives and says, “Hunting, great.” Yeah, Ahsoka thinks they’re going to be friends.

“Okay, we can do that,” Rex says, nodding, and the others are all nodding as well, and Ahsoka smiles at them.

“Cool,” she says. “Anyway, I gotta go kick Teren’s ass before he starts thinking he knows better than me ‘cuz I left him alone earlier, so I’ll see you at dinner.” With that she waves and ducks into the gym.

Carda had been proud, and she thinks Rex and Cody and them are going to make good additions to the clan.

Ahsoka thinks this has been a pretty good day.


End file.
